The Looking Glass War by John Le Carré

It’s been a while, a long while, since I read a real Le Carré banger. Yes, I’m not pretending that the other Le Carré I bought a couple of months ago in the same nifty recent paperback edition as this one and read and enjoyed in the interim wasn’t good and enjoyable and that, yeah, sure, whatever, but I am saying that that one (Call for the Dead) wasn’t trying as hard as this one.

Had less ambition.

Had less power.

Had less potency.

I’m saying that that one was just a pretty run of the mill 1960s thriller novel – conspicuously better than the one Lee Deighton novel I’ve read in the past year, but not something that felt like an elevation or an escalation of its genre, not like this, not like this, not like this…

The Looking Glass War, then, was published in 1965, so after Le Carré’s first famous banger (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963) and before his second super famous smash hit (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1974), so clearly in a fecund period of the former spy (I think?) and (if I remember correctly, though I might be thinking of someone else???) mad shagger.

This book – which I’d never heard of before buying it dirt cheap from a South London charity shop – is almost certainly good enough to stand alongside those totems of the genre, and of the late 20th century popular canon itself.

Then again, I read both of those Le Carré big hitters so long ago that I was basically a child when I read them and maybe they’re actually both shit (they are both popular so maybe???) and this less famous one, this artsy, edgy, emotionally volatile, gag-free sadistic novel about class and classism, identity and xenophobia, about misplaced ambition, false loyalty, lying, lying, lying, lying and about the consequences of the vapid dick-posturing of the Cold War era (cold war error, more like, ammaright???)

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The narrative is about a rival British intelligence office to George Smiley’s “The Circus” (Smiley cameos here cheaply, like a superhero in those films that people with only one degree and no internal lives hungrily watch, or watch while eating, Christ; you see the posters for these things on the tube so much you know all their names, even if you’re like a functional adult, like, but it’s hard to imagine there are people who watch these things with their computer game graphics and simplistic “good” Vs “evil” baby narratives… Like I would recognise a photo of “Aquaman” but would I ever of my own free will watch a movie with an Aquaman in??? No, of course not (I say this, but I did watch the newest Spider-Man cartoon movie while on the plane back from India last month and liked it lot, though not as much as I liked the noughties style sex comedy No Hard Feelings, which I loved (and not just because of its perfectly pitched gag about the iconic Canadian sex novel, Bear), so who the eff am I to judge???))-

It’s about this rival, smaller, intelligence agency that has a slightly credible (but not very) report about potential massive gun rockets (I dunno) in Northern Germany, then their guy who goes to collect the reported photos is hit by a car and killed while walking plastered from the airport to the airport hotel, so the old and past it former wartime spies pull one of their contacts (an aspirational and very naturalised Polish man living it up in London who loves the finer things in life and runs a successful small business) and trains him back up to go and infiltrate the Eastern bloc to check out these alleged missile placements.

Anyway, immediately in the field, the realities of peacetime espionage and the enforced brutality of being an illegal spy catch up with the man and he’s clearly out of his depth and out of luck; the English guys, hanging out in a farmhouse back over the iron curtain (which wasn’t a literal curtain or made of literal iron, just barbed wire and wood according to Le Carré) realise they’re over the hill incompetents living in a world and a period made for the George Smileys…

It’s very fucking melancholic, it’s very fucking sad. It’s about people willing to let other people die so they can preserve their defunct fantasies of a never-real golden age… I suppose it’s fucking pertinent to now, in its messaging, and probably has been ever since it was fucking written.

It’s a bleak, serious, sad, book, where nobody wins and nobody has any hope, any peace, any future. People trapping themselves in cycles they know to be bad. Giving up on change. Giving up on betterment. Giving up on each other.

Much better, much more serious and much fucking sadder than the thrillery trash I was in the mood for when I picked it up.

Definitely worth a read, though maybe not as light relief!

Ha ha ha